Dyer: Attack in Ahvaz prelude to coming war with Iran

The father of a 4-year-old boy killed in Saturday's terror attack on a military parade, mourns over his coffin during a mass funeral for the victims, in Ahvaz, Iran, on Mondat. (Ebrahim Noroozi/AP Photo/)

The men who carried out Saturday’s attack on the parade in Ahvaz, in Iran’s southwestern province of Khuzestan, were well trained. Four of them killed 25 people and wounded 70 others before they were shot dead. The question is whether they were trained by Islamic State or by the backers of the low-profile Ahvaz National Resistance, which also claimed credit for the attack.

Islamic State is an independent, ultra-extremist Sunni Muslim movement that kills Shiites (most Iranians are Shiite) on principle, so there are no big political implications if it were IS that planned the attack.

If it was the Ahvaz National Resistance, however, then these were the opening shots in the fourth Gulf War, because the ANR is backed by Saudi Arabia and its smaller Arab allies like the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain.

Iran is convinced it was the latter. “It is absolutely clear to us who committed this crime . . . and to whom they are linked,” said Iranian President Hassan Rouhani. “The small (Arab) puppet countries in the region are backed by America, and the U.S. is provoking them and giving them the necessary capabilities.”

There is reason to suspect this is true. The Arab countries of the Gulf are smaller and weaker than Iran, and have talked themselves into the paranoid conviction that Iran intends to destroy them, perhaps even to replace Sunni with Shia Islam. They talk of war with Iran as inevitable, and dream of drawing America into such a war to even up the odds.

President Donald Trump also is paranoid about Iran, and openly talks about overthrowing the Iranian regime. Indeed, his personal lawyer, Rudolph Giuliani, boasted on Saturday that U.S. sanctions are hurting Iran: “I don’t know when we’re going to overthrow them. It could be in a few days, months, a couple of years. But it’s going to happen.”

But first there has to be a spark, some Iranian action that gives both Trump and the Arab Gulf states a pretext for attacking Iran, for they both think in terms of attacking Iran first, not of defending against a (highly improbable) Iranian attack.

Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, said last year that “we won’t wait for the battle to be in Saudi Arabia. Instead, we will work so that the battle is for them in Iran.”

If they get their war, both leaders expect most of the heavy lifting will be done by the U.S. Air Force.

But something bad has to happen on the ground first. Iran has to do something stupid.

How do you get it to do something stupid? Well, you could try supporting separatist movements in the various ethnic minority areas that ring the country: Arabs in the southwest, Kurds in the northwest, Turks in the northeast and Baloch in the southeast. With luck, the Iranian regime will overreact and massacre enough of the separatists (and innocent bystanders) to provide the pretext for an Arab-U.S. attack.

After Saturday’s attack in Ahvaz, Abdulkhaleq Abdulla, a prominent United Arab Emirates scholar tweeted that the attack wasn’t really a terrorist incident at all. He pointed out that “moving the battle to the Iranian side is a declared option,” and predicted the number of such attacks “will increase during the next phase.”

If that’s the Saudi/American strategy, then sooner or later they will manage to goad the Iranian regime into committing some atrocity in return, and then we’re away to the races.

It would the fourth Gulf war in fewer than 40 years. The first was the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, in which the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein attacked the new revolutionary regime in Iran with intelligence and targeting information for his attacks from the U.S.

The second was the 1990-91 war between Iraq and most of its Arab neighbours, plus large numbers of American and other Western troops, after Saddam invaded Kuwait.

The third was in 2003, when George W. Bush invaded Iraq in the mistaken belief that Saddam had links with the al-Qaida terrorists who conducted the 9/11 attacks or was working on weapons of mass destruction.

And the fourth, coming soon, will be the U.S./Gulf Arab attack on Iran.

Of course, the attack in Ahvaz Saturday could just have been another meaningless spasm of hatred by Islamic State, and not a Saudi/American initiative at all. But if not now, then soon.

Gwynne Dyer’s new book is Growing Pains: The Future of Democracy (and Work).

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